The Six Acts were passed in 1819 after the Peterloo Massacre in which the army attacked a crowd of working-class people protesting for radical reform. The Six Acts were seen as highly repressive and were designed to stifle the radical agitation that had led to the protests at Peterloo. The Seditious Meetings Act tried to limit large scale meetings and discussions of reform. The Training Prevention Act and the Seizure of Arms Act were aimed at preventing radicals from forming their own armed militias by banning training with weapons and restricting the possession of weapons. Another part of the Six Acts was the Newspaper and Stamp Duties Act. This made the taxes on newspapers and other printed material much higher and was designed to curb the influence of the radical working-class press. 

John Stuart Mill mentions the Six Acts in passing while he describes the broader moment of radical agitation. He explains that “Radicalism under the leadership of the Burdetts and Cobbetts, had assumed a character and importance which seriously alarmed the Administration: and their alarm had scarcely been temporarily assuaged by the celebrated Six Acts” (58). His characterization of the Six Acts as designed to assuage the alarm of the government points to their widely perceived repressive quality. In this section, Mill’s sympathies are with the radicals and the tide of reform, which he sees as marking a period of “rapidly rising Liberalism” (58). 

Citations

Bloy, Marjie. “The Six Acts 1819.” The Victorian Web, victorianweb.org/history/riots/sixacts.html. 2003.